A Pokémon Scarlet and Violet exploit is letting players duplicate shiny Pokémon

A newly discovered exploit in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet lets players continually catch the same shiny Pokémon over and over.

As shared on YouTube by Austin John Plays, the glitch only works near an area that doesn’t have a loading screen when you enter it, such as an open town.

If you discover a shiny Pokémon (or any other Pokémon you want to duplicate outside this time), you have to catch it and then make your way towards the town.

Once you reach the town and its name appears on the screen, you have to then save the game and turn it off.

When the game is loaded again, the shiny Pokémon you already caught will still be in your storage, but when you return to the field another one will be there.

You can then catch it too, go back to the town and save again to repeat the process.

Austin John theorises that this is because the game only refreshes which wild Pokémon are nearby when you leave a town, and that by saving the game before you leave the town it keeps that previously caught Pokémon in its memory.

When the game is then reloaded, it pulls from its last known list of active wild Pokémon, including the one that had just been caught. The process can be viewed in full here:

It’s likely that an exploit like this will be fixed in a future patch, because if enough players do it and start trading their shiny duplicates online it could effectively ruin the scarcity of what’s supposed to be an extremely rare variant.

In VGC’s Pokémon Scarlet and Violet review, we said the games were the most feature-rich Pokémon titles in years but suffered from technical issues.

Further reading

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet walkthrough, tips, and Pokemon locations

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet tips, evolution methods and all class answers

“The huge expansion and changes to the single player campaign are great, the size of the world and the joy of exploration are the best in the series, and the new Pokemon and battle mechanics introduced all sing,” we wrote.

“However, it’s just impossible to shake the thought of how much better the game would feel if it was on more powerful hardware, or simply ran acceptably on Switch.”